


you, the one i left behind

by mazies



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, Dreams, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Named Apprentice (The Arcana), Originally posted on Amino, Other, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:34:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29345943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mazies/pseuds/mazies
Summary: Sometimes the only reason he goes to sleep is because he wants to see her. Sometimes the only reason he stays awake is because he’s afraid he won’t.or: why is Asra always napping.
Relationships: Apprentice/Asra (The Arcana), Asra Alnazar/Sofiya Lazareva
Kudos: 13





	you, the one i left behind

**Author's Note:**

> title from Hadestown's Flowers

**null.**

It's all a dream.

A heavy mist stretches out for miles. And in the distance, Asra could see a figure. Approaching maybe, or moving even further away.

“It’s not safe here,” Asra calls out to them. The smoke clears just enough for him to see, see her. It wasn’t uncommon for them to share dreams.

“Sofiya, is that you?”

She just smiles, looking content. She turns around, and nothing else. She doesn’t even look at him. As if she is going somewhere better, as if she hasn’t even seen Asra or heard him, lost in the fog.

“Don’t go,” Asra says. He sounds just like her, with the desperation clawing at his voice. He sounds just like her, asking him to stay. “Don’t go alone.”

She disappears into the fog, and Asra misses his chance.

It’s all a dream.

**i.**

He finds himself on the ground. Ashes, ashes, smoke and ashes. 

“Sofiya?” he rasps, tries to call out her name. Maybe she’s still here. He yells, his voice too hoarse to finish even a word. Pain bubbles under his skin, but nothing stings on the surface. It’s a pain from inside. It’s a purging sort of pain. His hands feel stiff and itchy.

The ashes are claws under his nails now. The skin of his fingers is scratched and bleeding, but he has to find her. _She’s still here._

“ _Here!_ ” Faust’s soft voice whispering in his ear. But she isn’t here. Not at all, not anymore.

**ii.**

They are in the shop. The bedroom upstairs, with their stove salamander and the sheets and pillows they’ve come to collect over the years.

He knows it’s a dream, and not a memory. He knows by the soundness of her sleep on the bed. If this were real, if this were a memory, she would be unable to lie still. That is how he knows her.

She twitched in her sleep, and tossed and turned as if her skin was only temporary and she needed to break free. That was something that always drew him to her. She had a restlessness that could not be tamed.

The window reveals nothing but darkness and the silent sound of rain. 

He knows it is a dream and not a memory because he knows this room. He knows the last time he ever saw her in it. He knows their fight and he knows her face as he walked out of the door...

Tentatively, Asra reaches forward, as if to wake her. Maybe just to brush away the pieces of hair that fall over her face. Or, just to touch her. To feel her skin against his and know that she’s still there.

He yanks his hands back when he sees them. Not bright, but a dull red. The color running down his fingers.

Is it his blood, he’s not sure anymore.

He doesn’t want to hold Sofiya with these hands — hands that have dug through ash and charred spirits, hands that held on and pleaded for them to run.

He does not want to touch Sofiya with these hands. But he does want to hear her voice. He wants to hear her, and understand her and listen. He couldn’t the last time he saw her.

“Wake up,” he tells her, as he did once before.

She doesn’t move, so he continues to watch her, to will her to open her eyes. Twitch, make a face. Toss or turn. She does not.

When he wakes up, he doesn’t need to ask where he is. There is no one to answer him.

Besides, he already knows.

**iii.**

They burned her body with the others, with the sun setting over the sea. He thinks of her, in her last moments. Was she conscious? Was she alive? Someone must know.

His foot dips into the water as he sits on the pier. Asra finds he can’t stand being there, so close to that shore. Somehow he can’t leave there either.

He is a ghost that Sofiya and the others had left behind.

Fire catches quickly in air this dry. The smoke rises up and consumes what’s left of the plague for the day. Asra watches from afar.

He closes his eyes and he tries to see her, sitting there next to him, watching the smoke drift up too. 

She would look serene but there would be a fire in her face, a furrow between her brows and her lips twitched in a smirk or a scoff. He expects to see it. No, he _wants_ to see it. He wants to see her smile trapped in her frequent daydreams. Her calm that never quite is.

But the dead don’t dream and what remains of Sofiya is sifting sand on the shore.

He opens his eyes.

“Sofiya,” he sighs beneath his breath, quiet enough that maybe all those lost spirits cannot hear. He is silent in his sorrow, but he will not give up this last chance to say her name while she is here. Or almost here, at the very least.

The smoke curls up, and the crowd calls out their sorrow as their grief drifts over the sea to join his.

**iv.**

“Is that really what you’d say to me at my own funeral? Just my name?” Sofiya frowns at him the way she always does, with a smile hiding inside her eyes. It’s almost enough to convince him that it’s real.

He reaches out to touch that constant furrow in her brow, a ghost of paranoia and concern. His hands are calloused and rough along the crease of her face, but she doesn’t shift away or disappear like dust in his palm.

In her eyes, the bloom of red that he never got to see.

This is how he knows he is dreaming.

“Like you can talk,” Asra tries a laugh, caught between notes of bitter and ironic. "You asked me to stay, but in the end, you're the one who left me behind.” It’s still silly of him to look for blame.

“I don’t think I could live with myself if I went with you.”

_I don’t think you can live at all._

He waits for tears. They never come.

But Sofiya does. She visits his dreams, a ghost that exists to put the living to shame.

He opens his eyes, and wonders when his dreams of her became his only refuge.

**v.**

When he isn’t dreaming of her, he is having nightmares. His skin drips with a dull red. He remembers the feel of blood and ash and sand.

When he isn’t dreaming, when he isn’t having nightmares, he lies simply and wide awake. There is no middle ground. There are no simple dreams of flying or of the world. Even the Magician does not come to visit. As if they’ve learned that Asra’s dreams were Sofiya’s domain now.

His nights have become defined by everything he lost to the Red Plague, and he’s not sure if he prefers it to having empty, common dreams.

He watches the ceiling and pretends that it’s the sky.

**vi.**

Sometimes the only reason he goes to sleep is because he wants to see her. Sometimes the only reason he stays awake is because he’s afraid he won’t.

**vii.**

He finds that they’re on a boat, sailing against the waves. It drifts past the Lazaret and everything in Asra’s body chills.

Her fingers are clasped in his, her thumbs pressing steadily across his knuckles. It feels strange, it feels right. Gently, he rubs the pad of his thumb across her fingers, caressing them as if trying to memorize the feeling.

Holding her hands feels like holding onto smoke.

Her hand grasps his softly. “Quiet,” Sofiya murmurs. Her head is lowered and her eyes are shut. The fall of her hair curtains her face, dark but fiery against the sun. "Fathers, mothers, children. Good people. Let us remember those we have lost.”

Instinctively, Asra bows his head and keeps the moment with her.

Water rasps at the hull with the rhythm of a lullaby, the slow beating of a sleepy heart.

“May those we lost find their way,” Sofiya adds. “And may we who mourn find the strength to walk again.”

Asra raises his eyes, waiting for her to look at him. When she doesn’t, he speaks. “Who do you pray for?” Her eyes open and lift to meet his. “Who do you mourn?”

“Who else?” She smiles gently, tilting her head in an unseen laugh as she tucks her hair behind her ear. “We mourn for those we have lost to the plague. We mourn for me.”

The setting sun rays die down slowly, into bleeding moonbeams. The light is steady in its sway, but something about her silhouette dances against it. Never has she looked so ghostly, so far away.

He looks behind him to that island of disease and flame, the new sun to replace the one he just lost. Sofiya is the sun on the shortest day of the year. A sun that burns away too bright, too quick.

Sofiya draws her hands away with her, and he almost reaches for her. But that’s the thing about smoke. It scatters where you chase it.

She leans on the sides of the gondola to look up at the sky, tilting her face up to the stars. For just a moment, his vision splits, from a dream into a memory. He remembers her brown hair and bright green eyes, rich with life. And sorrow too, a rarity for her.

He gave her that sorrow, the day he left Vesuvia without her. He gave her that sorrow and he’d have done anything to take it away. Sofiya’s happiness was something he would gladly spend his life chasing.

Of course, he hadn’t counted on whose life would be spent first.

Asra moves closer to the edge to sit by their side, tilting his head from the sky above to watch the water shifting below. The boat moves without a wind or a current, as dreams are never ruled by the powers of the waking world. Dreams are ruled by something much closer to heart.

After a while, he raises his eyes.

She’s already looking at him, her gaze steady and certain with a fire he wishes were never there, bright red against her muted green irises. He’d look away, but he should know when and when not to back down. He’d watched a plague swoop down on his city and let it be, he closed his eyes and ran.

So he holds her gaze, willing words from his throat. “I keep thinking you’ll appear randomly. Come out of nowhere. That you’d be alive. Maybe you’d burst into the shop and kick the door open, or dramatically arrive on the last night of the masquerade, materializing in the fountain… I don’t know.”

“Oh, Asra.” She smiles softly, uncharacteristic of her, whispering. “That sounds more like your trick than it is mine.”

“You can take it,” he blurts rapidly then turns away. _Stop talking_ , he tells himself, but he doesn’t. Because she’s dead anyway, isn’t she? What’s the point in keeping his secrets so close, in the one place he still feels safe? “I’d… I’d let you have it, if it means I’d be able to see you again…”

“You’re seeing me now.” She looks at him, her voice melancholy. There is nothing sharp and biting about the way she says it. It's just sad.

He watches as the edges of her face and the glow of the moonlight blur together. As if she is fading, as if she isn’t even there.

As if soon, she’ll be gone.

“I wish that was enough,” he sighs, fingers closing over the rails of the boat. They’re fast approaching a new shore. After a while, her hands fall over his, soft and gentle and barely there. Not holding on, but... not really letting go either.

“Aren’t you the type of person to take what he is given?” Sofiya asks him. Her ghostly fingers rub gently over the back of his hand. Is he just imagining the lilt of her voice? Is he just imagining her warmth?

He closes his eyes. It doesn’t matter because Sofiya is right. He is an orphan and a wanderer and a heartbroken boy. He knows exactly how to take what he can get. And yet. “That doesn’t stop me from wanting more.”

Her eyes flutter shut. Her voice is clipped. “If you really wanted more, you’d stop dreaming of me.”

The words twist in his gut, a painful retch, but he laughs all the same. It’s an empty noise. “Doesn’t seem to work that way.”

“You know what I mean,” she mutters. It’s more bitter than the half-hearted jab it was intended to be. It hangs in the air between them for just a moment.

“Do you want me to?”

“Want you to what?” Their eyes meet.

“Stop dreaming of you.”

The air between them coils with some unknown tension. It feels good to have her watching him instead of the other way around. He lets it stay like that for a moment, before he turns to meet her eyes.

“Well, do you?” he presses, leaning forward. It would only take her rising up slightly for them to meet in the middle.

Her gaze drifts to his mouth, and he knows that she's thinking the same thing.

“I doubt what I want has ever mattered very much,” she murmurs with a soft hum too unlike her. The Sofiya he knows is loud and alive with laughter. _Alive_. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips. “It never even mattered to me.” And she looks up at him.

The only warning he gets is her hand moving away from his, before she is rising up to meet him. He tilts his face to hers, lets her release his hand and angle her body toward him before he follows suit. He doesn’t reach for her until her hands settle at the back of his neck, doesn’t slide his fingers into her hair until she is holding herself flush against him.

Her mouth is solid on his, alive and warm with breath. How is this girl a ghost? How can she be anything but alive? How can a ghost taste of honey and feel like home?

It builds slowly in his chest. Heartache. Longing.

“It mattered to me,” he answers in between moments, then corrects himself. “It _matters_ to me.”

It is unsure who is hurting and who needs comfort. He can feel tears pooling at his cheek. Hers or his, he doesn’t know. They're still kissing when the gentle rasp of the hull meeting shore lulls him to waking.

There’s a lump in his throat, and his chest feels hollow. There are things in places where they should not be. But his eyes are dry, and he finds that it doesn’t matter so much.

Tears are meant for goodbye, and he has not given Sofiya Lazareva permission to go.

**viii.**

When he sees her again, it isn’t the familiar room, or the unknown boat. She’s sitting on the docks just as he imagined her all those months and dreams ago and somehow he just _knows_.

He knows this will be his last dream of her, because her eyes are just green, without the red. She looks just as she did. She does not look like a ghost. She looks like a girl.

She looks like goodbye.

He moves to take a seat next to her at the edge of the dock, the heels of their shoes skimming the waves when they approach. They watch the sunrise for a moment, and he begins to fear that she would disappear with the night.

“Why me?” he asks her. Their eyes do not meet and they do not try to. “Why do you visit me? Why not that doctor you worked with, or one of your patients? Muriel, or Selasi? Why me?”

Sofiya tilts her head. “I don’t know.” That’s when she looks at him; her eyes search his face. “I think it’s because you never got to say goodbye.”

“I don’t want to,” he admits. “...please.”

“This… this life isn’t enough for you. It’s half a life and it _shouldn’t_ be enough for you,” her voice is rich with sorrow. “It’s not enough for anyone.”

He tilts his face to the side to kiss her. Avoiding, again. Running, even further. “I’m not just anyone.”

“You can’t live like this,” Sofiya whispers against his mouth. Her hand clamps his wrist and the warmth of her touch is a feeling he only hopes to know again when he’s awake. The tickle of her breath on his face is a feeling he would die for.

“I can try.”

She shuffles and stands and that makes him think that he’s said something wrong. He must have.

“Sofiya,” he trips over his words and he trips over the dock. “Sofiya, please. Please... don’t do this.” He grabs her hand, or at the very least tries to. The missing tears which had once seemed so out of reach are at a rush now, spilling over his face like blood from a vein. She’s already fading, already slipping away.

“I should have made you promise,” he fights to keep his hands still as he scrambles for a hold of her. “I should have made you promise that I’d see you again.”

But it doesn’t work that way, and deep down Asra knows that. That this was meant to be his chance. 

“You’re seeing me now.”

He gives a small and bitter laugh, just as she did before. “You know what I mean.”

There’s one last solid feeling, her fingertips burning through his like mist. Her voice is warmth like fire, the heat of a rising sun. She steps close to him, a soft palm against his face, and presses a kiss to the corner of his lips.

“Wake up, Asra. Please.”

**ix.**

There are still tears when he wakes, but Sofiya Lazareva is already gone.

**x.**

He still dreams of her, but it’s never the same. She laughs and scoffs and smiles, but there’s no life in it. No truth. She doesn't say anything that she hasn’t already said before.

He still dreams of her anyway.


End file.
